ball of lightning [dot] com

Bowled in the Christmas tournaments down in Allentown and Cherry Hill. Pretty much sucked ass in both of them. I had actually bowled in a scratch sweeper in Poughkeepsie the Sunday before Christmas, and had this hideous mental breakdown in the first game– I only shot 149 with six opens– five of them were very makable. I had similar spurts of that all week down south; ironically, a lot of low scores were games I grinded, and just couldn’t string strikes, and a lot of the bad games were ones that I should have put up big 240+ ones and would open three times like an idiot to hit a low deuce. Lot of people keep asking me what I’m planning on doing with it out of college, and I honestly don’t know. Technically, I still have one more year of eligibility left, so I could technically bowl for my grad school (Stanford, Illinois, Penn State, and Florida State all have teams) but I’m leaning towards no. I don’t want to be the kid who just shows up to one practice and goes to a tournament over a kid who worked his ass off and gets left off because I decided I wanted to go one weekend over him. It has gotten less fun each year too– my first year of competition (sophomore year, since I didn’t join the team until the end of the season freshman year) we won a tournament (ironically my first) and while we sucked after that, we still had fun during and after tournaments. Last year, I started to take more control with planning, organizing, running, etc. and we still had a pretty good time, but there was a lot of work involved. This year we have a completely new group of people for the A team (myself and Brian being the only full-time holdovers from last year, let alone two years ago) and we just haven’t gelled to the point to be successful. Which sucks, because we have a lot of individual talent, but we just can’t put it all together at tournaments. One point I note is that our team is terribly professional (i.e. not very excitable), which, I’m sure is an effective tactic to prevent against suffering mental implosions (a.k.a. myself) but it also is really hard to get a good stream of energy to the team. Of course, these guys never did team sports in high school (or even something like intramurals at the college level), so I suppose I have infinitely more experience there. I suppose when you are trained in individual sports (like bowling or golf), you are trained to keep your emotions in check, and not get too excited about anything so everyone merely is doing what they’ve always done, but it can be somewhat of a drag sometimes when everyone walks back shot after shot with a blank expression on their face, and sit in a chair quietly until their next shot.

What a shitty post and a waste of your time. Sorry.